A five minute guide to the new V&A East Storehouse’s treasures

Where does a storehouse end and a museum begin? The opening, on May 31, of the new V&A’s East Storehouse in Stratford, London, triggers the question, for this is much more than a repository for the museum’s bulging collections. Covering more than 172,000sq ft across four levels — an area nearly 18 times Wimbledon’s Centre Court — it is packed with frescos and stage costumes, samurai swords and 350,000 books — all available to the public.

The curios it holds are just as interesting as the other weird and wonderful things lurking in Britain's museum basements. ‘It’s the first time any museum has done anything this ambitious,’ says senior curator Georgia Haseldine. Together with 100 curated displays, the storehouse also offers an ‘order an object’ service: ‘If it’s stable enough and isn’t too fragile, you’ll be able to handle it.’

1. Asked to choose a favourite from the Aladdin’s cave that is the Storehouse, Haseldine admits that she changes her mind every day. Today, it is a Vivienne Westwood raincoat from her Portrait collection, made with rubberised cotton in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Swarm of Cherubs print. ‘In the past 35 years, that rubberised cotton she used has completely adhered — so we’re showing it as it is now, almost like a board’
2. Among the largest pieces on show is the Kauffman Office designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for department-store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann — his most complete interior found outside the US. ‘The marquetry mural that Wright makes [for Kauffman] is staggeringly beautiful,’ says Dr Haseldine
3. The 17th-century colonnade from the fort at Agra, India, is a triumph of exquisitely carved floral designs inlaid with coloured stones. Dr Heseldine brought in a group of dancers to shoot a film there and used lighting to help them experience what the place would have looked like next to the river at Agra. ‘The whole colonnade came to life, shimmering with a kind of moonlight [and] all the precious stones iridescing’
4. When Ballets Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev visited the studio of Pablo Picasso, he fell for one of the paintings, The Two Women Running along the Beach — so he commissioned a gigantic copy of it to use as stage cloth. Picasso liked it so much that he signed it. Used for Le Train Bleu ballet, the cloth is so big that when the V&A displayed it in 2010, it took the museum two weeks, five riggers, 10 members of staff and a scaffolding tower to put it up. Yet, it is well worth the effort. ‘We all wish we were in a Fitzgerald novel,’ says Haseldine. ‘I just want to be at those parties on the Riviera and I feel like [the cloth] can transport us all back to that moment’
5. The same sheen as mother of pearl, but at a fraction of a price: no wonder that the Victorians went wild for fish scales. The Storehouse has a tiara from about 1870–74 that looks a little like a string of delicate cherry blossoms. ‘I can’t quite imagine what it would feel like to be that bride: “I’m going to wear this tiara covered in fish scales”’, laughs Haseldine, ‘but also, you wouldn’t know what it was made of when you looked at it’